From Open Access Publishing to Open Science

Abstract

By facilitating and accelerating access to knowledge, the digital revolution and the development of the internet in the 1990s constituted a “disruptive” innovation that radically transformed the models and practices of scientific information transmission. It opened the way to open access in science, a novel and promising solution that promotes the sharing of publications and data, and new modes of research assessment. The COVID-19 crisis and the spread of fake news on social networks have shown how necessary it has become to provide scientific information that is controlled by the community and freely accessible to citizens. This chapter will focus on the processes that underpin the production of Open Science by examining the development of open access scholarly publishing in Europe, particularly for the social sciences and humanities.